10th EUROPEAN WORKSHOP ON
NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION

Natural language generation (NLG) is a subfield of natural language
processing that focuses on the generation of written texts in natural
languages from some underlying non-linguistic representation of
information, generally from databases or knowledge
sources. Accomplishing this goal may be envisioned for a number of
different purposes, including standardized and/or multi-lingual
reports, summaries, machine translation, dialogue applications, and
embedding in multi-media and hypertext environments. Consequently,
the automated production of language is associated with a large number
of highly diverse tasks whose appropriate orchestration in high
quality poses a variety of theoretical and practical
problems. Relevant issues include content selection, text
organization, production of referring expressions, aggregation,
lexicalization, and surface realization, as well as coordination with
other media.

The workshop continues a biennial series of workshops on natural
language generation that has been running since 1987.
Previous European workshops have been held at
Royaumont, Edinburgh, Judenstein, Pisa, Leiden, Duisburg,
Toulouse (2001) and
Budapest (2003).
The series provides a regular forum for presentation of research in
this area, both for NLG specialists and for researchers who may not
think of themselves as part of the NLG community.

The 2005 workshop will span the interest areas of natural language
generation and Artificial Intelligence, with a special focus on
research that integrates NLG with AI, including vision, robotics,
intelligent agents, and knowledge discovery. We also encourage papers
that investigate the use of state-of-the-art generation technology in
real world applications to handle both spoken and text output, and
apply language generation techniques to interactive AI systems like
communicating robots, to allow the user to enter into short
conversations with the system in search for information. There will be
demonstrations of working NLG systems, and special sessions for
posters describing real-world applications and advanced language
technology systems.

Topics of Interest

We welcome papers on formal, corpus-based, implementational and
analytical work on conventional NLG topics (realisation,
microplanning, etc), and especially papers with a focus on the
following themes:

Embodied agents and robot communication (special track)

NLG for real-world applications

Use of ontologies in NLG

Statistical methods for NLG

Information organization for planning and NLG

Robust methods and techniques for NLG

Evaluation of NLG systems

We also welcome discussion on the challenges that these viewpoints
pose for generation systems and applications, as well as new ideas and
solutions for architectures and general frameworks. Especially, we
invite research papers on applying natural language generation in
interactive robotics and other AI systems.

Invited Speaker

Kevin Knight (Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern
California) will give an invited talk on

Tree Transducers for Machine Translation and Generation

Abstract: Probabilistic finite-state methods have been very
successful for natural language processing (NLP) problems like
tagging, entity identification, and transliteration. These methods
have also been packaged in very useful software toolkits. However,
they are not so good for attacking problems with large-scale
reordering (translation, generation, paraphrasing, question answering,
etc.) and sensitivity to syntax. Over the past three years, new
probabilistic tree-based models have been built and tested for a
variety of NLP applications. Many of these models turn out to be
instances of tree transducers, a formal automata model first described
by W. Rounds and J. Thatcher in 1970. This opens up new opportunities
for us to marry deeper representations, automata theory, and machine
learning, and to create general-purpose tools that can be applied to
many NLP problems. This talk will cover new learning algorithms for
tree automata, and large-scale natural language experiments.

Submissions (now closed)

Papers are divided into two types: long papers describing theoretical
contributions, and short papers describing ideas or project
implementations. Long papers are presented orally and the short papers
are presented as posters (not orally). Demos can be associated with
short papers, if the presenters bring their own laptop.

Proceedings

All accepted papers (long and short) will be published in the workshop
proceedings.
If you will need extra copies of the proceedings, please contact Ehud
Reiter in advance.